


cool for cats

by middlecyclone



Category: Buzzfeed: Worth It (Web Series)
Genre: Animal Transformation, Bugs & Insects, Cats, Curses, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 12:26:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13636278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlecyclone/pseuds/middlecyclone
Summary: Andrew has never believed in the Buzzfeed Curse before, because the Buzzfeed Curse is patently stupid.Except now, somehow, he's been turned into a cat.Great.





	cool for cats

Andrew has never believed in the Buzzfeed Curse before, because the Buzzfeed Curse is patently stupid.

“Don’t touch that prop,” Quinta had told him. “It’s magic.”

“That’s a cursed spatula,” Rie had pointed out. “Don’t use it in this Tasty video.”

“Dude, don’t drink that green tea,” Keith had said, “it’s a hundred years old and basically just dust. It’ll probably give you cholera or something.”

Andrew had ignored all of them. It had seemed like the most sensible option at the time, but now he regrets all those decisions when he stands up to leave work late one evening, alone in the office, and his world falls out from underneath him. 

He suddenly finds himself dropping rapidly to the ground, his legs melting beneath him and the carpeted floor racing up to meet him; he falls forward, his hands hitting the ground and then he’s shrinking, smaller and smaller until he’s cowering beneath his desk chair, shell-shocked, and–does he have a  _ tail _ ? 

Andrew opens his mouth to scream because seriously,  _ what _ , but all that comes out of his mouth is a tiny little ‘meow,’ and–

Oh.

He’s been turned into a cat.

Well,  _ shit. _

 

(=^･^=) (=^･^=) (=^･^=)

 

He thinks about trying to go home, but his keys had been in the pocket of his jeans and all his clothes seem to have absorbed themselves somehow into his new little furry cat body, so that’s out. And anyway, it’s not like cats can drive or open doors or call an Uber either, so even if he did have his keys, there’s still no way he would ever make it back to his apartment.

And so Andrew sets off to explore.

The thing about being a cat is that he’s impossibly nimble in a way he hadn’t anticipated; it takes a few tries to get used to having four legs instead of two, but after a few tumbles he’s leaping from desk to desk and floor to counter with an easy grace.

The BuzzFeed offices look so different when you’re less than a foot tall, he’s realizing. The open plan office that seems generously sized as a human is cavernous as a cat. And colors all seem odd, now; washed out, kind of, and everything is a little blurry, like he’s suddenly become nearsighted.

After a few minutes, the lights click off. He’s not large enough as a cat to trigger the motion sensors to turn them back on again, but for all their faults, his new eyes have excellent night vision, and so he can keep investigating.

He’s thirsty, he realizes after a fair amount of poking around the various knick-knacks and papers strewn across Quinta’s old desk. He checks out the sink in the breakroom, but for all that his human mind understands the mechanics of the tap, his cat paws don’t have the coordination or the strength to flip the faucet, so he has to get a little more desperate. Sara has a glass of water sitting out on her desk, and he sticks his head in there and laps frantically. 

Hey, a cat’s gotta do what a cat’s gotta do.

He’s hungry, too, but for all that they love to snack at BuzzFeed, nobody has actually left any food out–or at least, not anything that smells edible. There’s some M&Ms in a bowl at reception, but Andrew is pretty sure chocolate is poisonous to cats–or maybe that’s dogs? Either way, he’s not keen on risking it.

He hears a tiny scratching noise on the other side of the office, and he’s kind of impressed by how good his cat hearing is before he’s trotting across the carpet to find a house centipede crawling under Zack’s desk.

Andrew  _ hates  _ centipedes, he hates them so much; even just thinking about them usually gives him horrible, full-body shudders, but as a cat?

He bats at it with one paw, involuntarily, reflexively. It skids across the floor a few inches.

He bats at it again.

He pats it into the carpet until it’s dead and then, his kitty instincts completely divorced from his still  _ very _ human mind, he eats it.

God, the things he would do for some caviar.

 

(=^･^=) (=^･^=) (=^･^=)

 

He curls up on one of the couches and drifts off for a few hours. He has bizarre half-cat, half-human dreams about chasing mice around and around in endless circles, until the mice become tiny little Stevens, shouting about truffles and gold and too much dairy, and Andrew wakes up in the middle of the night full of energy and absolutely  _ starving _ .

He does a few laps of the office at high speed, because why not, and thinks about looking for another centipede to eat, but his human consciousness is enough in control at the moment to absolutely veto that plan.

The couch was soft, but lonely; the empty office isn’t exactly creepy, but he’s not a huge fan of it either. He wanders around looking for something that smells familiar and comforting, and ends up in Steven’s chair for some reason. 

It smells like pizza and sugar and  _ Steven _ , and Andrew feels a little stupid but he’s a very small creature all of a sudden, okay, he’s got a lot of emotions and they won’t all fit into his new eleven-pound body. He’s great at squashing everything down when he’s got like 5’ 8” to work with, but now? It’s not working so great.

So maybe he wants to be closer to Steven basically all the time. It’s not an issue. It’s certainly not a _problem_. It’s just a–a thing that’s happening. Steven smiles and laughs and feeds him ice cream, and Andrew puts his arm around Steven’s shoulders and stares into his eyes because it’s the absolute closest he can get and still keep his plausible deniability.

He’s working on it, okay.

But he’s working on it while he’s a human. As a cat, there’s not a whole lot he can do, except fall asleep again.

Which he does.

 

(=^･^=) (=^･^=) (=^･^=)

 

“Hey,” someone is saying loudly, “there’s a cat in my chair!”

“Relax, Steven,” someone else is saying, “you don’t need to yell–oh. Oh, there  _ is  _ a cat in your chair.”

Andrew wakes up, and stretches, and says, with all the confidence and gravitas he can muster, “Mrrrp.”

Right. 

Cat.

“Hey, little dude,” Steven coos, “how did you get in here?” He’s holding his hand out under Andrew’s nose for him to sniff. Andrew is pretty sure that’s for dogs, not cats, but he smells Steven’s hand anyway. It smells like chocolate donuts, and coffee, and lemon-scented hand soap.

“Hey, where’s Andrew?” Adam asks. “He’s usually here by now.”

“Let me text him,” Steven says, and then does. 

Andrew’s phone, still sitting on his desk next to his computer, buzzes loudly. Adam, hearing it, frowns. 

“Hey,” he says, “did Andrew–”

“He left his phone here,” Steven says, and his face has gone tight and pale with worry. “That’s not–well, that’s not great.”

“There’s no sign of a struggle, or anything,” Adam says, “and the alarm was still on when we got in this morning.”

“Struggle? Who said anything about a  _ struggle _ ?!”

“I’m just saying–”

Andrew, seeing a chance while the boys are distracted, takes it.

It’s a simple matter to leap from Steven’s chair to his own desktop; it’s a less simple matter to tap at the screen of his phone until it unlocks, but he manages that too. The touchscreen recognizes his toe beans just fine, it’s just that his cat paws lack the dexterity to easily type in his passcode. But it opens eventually, and while Steven and Adam are still fighting he’s able to open Messages (with an unintentional side detour into Slack and Google Maps) to his last conversation, which had been with Steven.

He tries to type, “i’m the cat,” but it comes out “in tgis cZsdes,” which is less than ideal. He thinks about trying again, but he can hear Adam and Steven start to wind down and possibly notice him again, and he doesn’t want that, so he finds a generic man emoji and the cat emoji and manages, somehow, to tap them both on his first try.

He hits send, and then Steven says, “hey! No! Buddy!” and wraps his hands around Andrew’s stomach, lifting him bodily off the desk and then dropping him to the floor. “Don’t play with that!”

“Cats are so weird,” Adam observes. 

Steven just reaches for his back pocket, and then frowns. “Wait, what? I have a message from Andrew.”

“What’s it say?”

“In tee-gee-eye-ess cee-zee .. okay no, this is gibberish. And then there’s some emojis. Seriously, his phone was on the desk by the cat, how did he send this? Does he have it hooked up to his laptop at home, do you think? Why would he just send nonsense?”

“Maybe the cat sent it.”

“Ha ha,” Steven says drily. “The phone was locked. That would explain the cat emoji, though.”

Andrew, pointedly, meows.

Adam looks at him. Steven looks at him.

“You don’t think... “ Adam says slowly.

“I don’t think what, Adam?”

“You don’t think … maybe … Andrew  _ is  _ the cat?”

Andrew meows again.

“Don’t be an idiot.”

Andrew meows once more, louder this time, and pads over to Steven, putting a paw on his leg.

Steven looks down.

“No way.”

Andrew unsheathes his claws. 

“Ouch! Don’t do that! Still–no way.”

Andrew flicks his tail, annoyed, and digs his claws in even tighter.

“God! Alright, Adam–you may have a point.”

“Keith warned him about that tea last week.”

“Rie warned him about that spatula last month.”

“And then there was that whole debacle with Quinta and Justin and the props closet–”

“Come on, guys,” Andrew interjects, “it’s me.” It comes out “mrow,” of course, but still–it does the job. 

“Holy shit,” Adam says softly. “Andrew’s a cat.”

“Andrew’s a  _ cat _ ,” Steven shrieks, and half the office turns to stare at him, and that’s that.

 

(=^･^=) (=^･^=) (=^･^=)

 

“Huh,” Shane says, voice mild. “I guess I was wrong.”

“Ha!” Ryan shrieks. “I knew I would convince you! I knew you would have to admit ghosts are real!”

“Hey, now,” Shane protests, “I never said I believed ghosts are real.”

Ryan looks like he’s about to combust. “Andrew is a cat,” he says flatly, “and you’re still playing the skeptic?”

“I mean, I believe in the BuzzFeed curse now,” Shane explains, “because I see Andrew with my own eyes, and he has become small, adorable, and fluffy. But I don’t see any evidence of ghosts, so–”

Ryan storms off towards the breakroom. Shane, laughing, follows him.

Andrew, hopefully, follows them, thinking that maybe one of them will sneak him bits of a sandwich or something because he is  _ starving _ , but Steven grabs him around the stomach and picks him up.

“Oh, no you don’t,” he says. “We’ve got a video to film.”

“Mrrp?”

“You’re hungry, right, Andrew?”

“Mrow!”

“Well, I figured we could do a special edition of Worth It.”

“Oh God,” Sara, standing next to them, snorts. “Steven, tell me you’re not going to Worth It for cat food, please.”

Steven says nothing.

Sara picks up her water glass. Andrew meows frantically at her, remembering his so-called dinner last night, but she ignores him and takes a long drink from it. After a moment, she splutters. “Ew,” she says, “is there cat hair in here?”

“Mrow.”

She glares at Andrew. “Caught in the act,” she hisses.

He just meows again.

“All right, all right,” Steven says, cutting in, “let’s do this.”

 

(=^･^=) (=^･^=) (=^･^=)

 

Andrew looks up at Steven, because this is just _ not _ okay.

Steven isn’t looking.

“Today on Worth It,” he says, looking near but not  _ at  _ the camera, because he is a professional, “we’re trying three different cat foods, at three drastically different price points, to find out which cat food is the most worth it at it’s given price point. Here with me to try them out, is our good friend Andrew, who has been magically turned into a cat.”

“There’s no way you can publish this,” Andrew complains, in one long, low, yowl.

“Now, being a human being, I’ve never actually eaten cat food before, and considering that he’s  _ usually _ also a human being, Andrew presumably hasn’t either. But he’s looking pretty hungry, so I figure we can’t pass up this opportunity to hear a review directly from the horse’s mouth–well, from the cat’s mouth. So here we go!”

Andrew looks down at the three full bowls of cat food in front of him, because again–this is  _ not  _ okay.

“Okay!” Steven chirps. “First up, at 59¢ a can, we have Fancy Feast Grilled Delights! This flavor is–uh–” He picks up the discarded can and reads off it, “‘Whitefish & Cheddar Cheese Feast in Gravy!’”

Andrew stares down. It looks, honestly, like someone has already eaten the Whitefish & Cheddar Cheese Feast in Gravy and vomited it up into this bowl.

“Eat up, Andrew!” Steven says, enthusiastically. “Get ready to give a review!”

This is honestly offensive and humiliating on every imaginable level, and Andrew would be over there scratching Steven’s shins to shreds except–

Well. He’s really,  _ really  _ hungry.

The worst thing about the Whitefish & Cheddar Cheese Feast in Gravy is that it’s actually pretty good.

 

(=^･^=) (=^･^=) (=^･^=)

 

The other two cat foods are honestly even better, which is kind of a relief, because Andrew has eaten caviar and truffles and ice cream crusted with gold leaf. If he develops a taste for  _ Fancy Feast _ –

He can’t even handle the thought.

Steven busies himself with editing the video, and Andrew spends a few minutes padding around the office, bored, keeping himself occupied by leaping on the backs of the couches and batting a ballpoint pen around, until Anie comes over, glares at him, and picks him up like he’s a sack of potatoes. 

“You,” she tells him, “are adorable, but you are  _ so  _ annoying.”

She carries him over to Steven’s desk and drops him, roughly, into his lap.

“He’s  _ your _ co-host,” Anie says bluntly. “That means he’s  _ your _ problem.”

Andrew tries to glare at her, but he suspects he’s not able to muster up quite the irritated vitriol he manages as a human. 

It’s hard weighing nine pounds.

“Okay, okay,” Steven says, “I’ll deal with the fluffball.”

“Hey,” Andrew meows, affronted.

Steven grins at him. “Take a nap, buddy,” he says. “Cats sleep a lot, right? Maybe you just need some rest.”

Andrew opens his mouth to protest, but he finds himself yawning, mouth opening wider and wider than he ever thought possible, and suddenly he really  _ is  _ tired, so tired he can barely manage to keep his eyes open.

“There’s a good boy,” Steven says, and Andrew fully intends to nip at his hands in punishment for being so fucking condescending, but before the thought even enters his mind he finds himself curled up in Steven’s lap, asleep.

 

(=^･^=) (=^･^=) (=^･^=)

 

Andrew doesn’t wake up until, hours later, Steven stands up to head home, rudely dumping Andrew onto the floor.

“Mrrrr,” he says, cranky, and then Steven picks him up.

“Come on, dude,” he says, scratching behind Andrew’s ears, “calm down. You’re coming home with me.”

Andrew, to his supreme horror, starts involuntarily purring.

“Aww,” Steven coos, “who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy?”

Andrew meows, “You know it’s me in here, right? You remember that I’m not actually a cat?”

“Glad to see you two are getting along,” Sara, passing by, notes drily.

“We sure are, aren’t we, buddy? Yes we are! Yes we are!”

Andrew thinks about wriggling his way out of Steven’s arms, because seriously, this is just embarrassing for both of them, but–well. 

Steven’s arms are nice.

“ _ You’re _ a good boy,” Steven says, his voice reaching a heretofore unheard register, and then he kisses Andrew smack dab in the middle of his forehead, and then suddenly–

His feet hit the ground, his  _ human  _ feet, and his hands–not his paws!–are draped around Steven’s shoulders, and he’s staring into Steven’s eyes, their faces inches apart, and Andrew is a  _ person  _ again.

“Hi,” Steven says.

“Oh, thank  _ fuck _ ,” Andrew says.

Behind them, someone gasps. “True love’s kiss,” Sara says wonderingly.

Andrew turns around, still in Steven’s arms, to glare at her. “Shut up, Sara,” he says. “I am not in love with Steven.”

“And I’m not in love with Andrew!”

Sara shrugs at them. “It’s only supposed to work if you both feel the same way,” she says airily, and then grabs her laptop and heads into one of the meeting rooms.

Andrew steps back, feeling his cheeks heat. “I don’t–” He coughs then, suddenly, something stuck in his throat, and is horrified to immediately realize that it’s a combination of cat fur and whitefish. He retches dramatically, and Steven just laughs.

“Do you want to go get dinner?” Steven asks.

“ _ God,  _ yes,” Andrew says fervently. “Anything but seafood.” 

Steven smiles at him then, sidelong and shy, and–

Well.

If Sara does her due diligence with regards to the office gossip circuit, and he  _ knows  _ she will, their fairy-tale ending will everyone’s news by tomorrow morning. Andrew hates being talked about, hates it with a fiery passion, but if it’s going to happen anyway, he figures he may as well earn it properly. He's just spent 24 hours as a cat. He's very into seizing the moment right now.

Andrew’s heart is pounding as he reaches out and grabs Steven’s wrist, but Steven is staring at him like he knows what he’s about to do, his eyes wide in nervous anticipation but a smile still curving the corners of his mouth, and then they’re kissing.

Steven’s lips are soft and warm, soft at first and then–less so, and Andrew really wishes that it hadn’t taken him getting magically transformed into a cat to get them to this point, but if that’s how it has to be–

Well, it’s probably worth it.

Steven kisses him one last time, hard, and then he’s got a hand on Andrew’s shoulder and is pushing him backwards, laughing, “God, dude, your mouth tastes  _ awful _ .”

“Sorry. That would be the Fancy Feast.”

“So … Dinner? In ‘n Out?”

“Yeah,” Andrew says, grinning uncontrollably, “sounds good.”

 

  
  
  



End file.
